Social Media: Changing the Game

A new age of media has awoken. No longer are we just an audience being fed a one-way message from advertisers and giant corporations, the public has become the media generators. The audience has a dual-role as creators and subscribers of media, and every story can be shared with millions within a Milli-second.
To say the phenomena of social media has changed society, would be a huge understatement.

Without social media girls wouldn't be fighting over Justin Beiber, who was discovered by his hits on YouTube, and within weeks became Ushers mini sidekick.

Without social media, arguably Obama wouldn't be our president. His team set the precedent for political social networking. According to MarketingMag.com, "Number of Obama Supporters on Facebook on election day: 3,000,000
Number of McCain supporters on Facebook on election day: 600,000". Not only did Obama use the most popular social media website, he went touch all portals of the web including blogs, his own youtube channel,Flickr,and Twitter when it was in its baby stage. The number of young adults votes were the highest in any election due to the campaign platform of social media. Obama reached his target market by marketing and connecting with the audience on a personal level. His main election success can be attributed to his social networking campaign.

Social Media has allowed for the most interpersonal interaction between brands and their consumers. Now brands must stick by their promise, and when they don't consumers can write nasty reviews all over the web, on the brands web page or even create websites such as, Walmartsucks.com.
Brand to consumer marketing has gotten so personal, when you want to order a pizza, you can make it on your Iphone application, press a few buttons and have it delivered in 30 minutes.

Social Media burst in like a tornado, drastically changing the game, but the question is will it move on fast like a tornado and just be a fad, or last for decades?

Appifany

Addiction. Junky. Fiend. Crave. Obsession.
How far does your media consumption take you?
Growing up in the emergence of the popularity of the world wide web, when AOL was the only web browser to have and we had to LISTEN to the beeps and buzzes of signing on dial-up, I have spent almost my whole life in front of this familiar screen.

A decade later I find myself in college, immersing myself even more into this new media consumption, and studying the art and science and how this technology influences my chosen career path in the Communications field.

Thus, this blog was born, I decided to do something productive with all this consumption fused with my passion of writing.

Too many thoughts too many ideas, so read and comment if you wish, because I have joined the citizen journalists online..aka BLOGGERS.

From Myspace to facebook to twitter and all the other social media networks that failed in between, social media has become an important aspect of our society.

Are we using social media or is social media using us?
Advertisers were falling off as internet increased in popularity, it happened so fast they needed to abandon the model that allowed prosperity for so long.
Advertisers have taken a bold step to using social media to their advantage and created a brand and personality just as we have.
How many hours a day do we spend on these social media sites? As a college student I know how easy it is to become distracted by a quick facebook chat and not return to my paper for hours.
Social Media is major in MY life, as a communications/media monger.
I am amazed by it, but it can have its downsides, such as bullying increase due to people feel more confident behind the computer screen, scary online dating, bad pictures on the web and TOO much information sharing.

I compare the media relationship to an affair because it is something we cannot resist. We always have that undenying relationship with the media whether we try to escape or embrace it. Media impressions hit us thousands of times a day. Media is held high in our culture but then again what does that really say about our culture?

Like I stated at the top of the blog: Use caution with media consumption.